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Nokia cuts jobs in new services unit

Nokia announced plans to streamline operations across its services unit, an effort that will trim about 450 jobs worldwide.

Nokia said it would focus investments on fewer projects and accelerate the creation of a common platform across the firm's offerings.

But it is cutting 360 jobs in its new service unit just ahead of the launch of its Ovi platform, which is intended to compete with Apple’s App Store.

The handset giant said the revamp would create a simpler user experience across its services and open up new opportunities for third-party developers.

Chief among the changes: All mobile games will become available via the Ovi Store, but will also remain available through existing channels like the N-Gage service.

Nokia also said it will turn to partners like digital imaging sites and social networking services to bolster the image capture and sharing features on its devices, promising to enhance the user experience for customers who actively use third party services. Nokia adds the changes will realize cost-efficiencies in a number of areas.

Nokia's evolving relationship with the developer community is the focus of the Nokia Developer Summit 2009 conference, taking place this week in Monte Carlo. Nokia executive vice president of services Tero Ojanperä encouraged the 345 developers in attendance to think of the Ovi initiative as a programming platform, not just a service.

“We're going to expose and open Ovi through APIs in a completely new manner,” Ojanperä said. “Look at Ovi as a platform you can develop applications on top of - to enhance the experience, and to build value.”

Ojanperä reiterated Nokia's commitment foster a developer environment that cuts across platforms and leverages a large number of handsets, and said the company ultimately plans to offer applications optimized for all of the devices in its catalog, not just smartphones.